Art College and The Introduction of a New Technology.
My education is predominantly in art, having attended Stourbridge College of Art in the early 80's studying graphic design for which I achieved a higher diploma.
Whilst in my final year of college a new tool was introduced, this was a dedicated paint computer. A mobile phone could do more nowadays but at the time it was the bee's knees and seemed the future of graphics!
A local video company called Optical Image bought the very same machine, coming to the college to find any budding computer graphics students and I was employed along with another interested student.
We learned all about video production and creating graphics for video. I was made redundant in the early nineties and became a van driver for a few years.
3D came a long way in that short time and I went back into animation for another production company creating visualisations of holiday resorts and apartments. Finally, I went self-employed in 2002 and have been ever since.
I do still have some examples of the work I have produced in the early days of my career, if you are interested in the journey from early, vintage computer generated imagery then read on.
Early Days of Video Graphics.
The computer at Art College and at the first production company I worked for was a Spaceward Microsystems Supernova which was basically a dedicated paint computer and was the first 32 bit computer in the UK.
Below are some of the first images created on a Supernova, it wasn't always as simple as creating graphics nowadays, I remember, for example, to create a fade you would divide the screen into lots of individual lines and there was an operation called sequential flood fill,
which would fill each section with a slightly different colour! This is why you can see the banding on the images below, not quite the smoothest fade!
First Animations Using a Computer
Here are some surviving examples of the first animations produced using the Supernova and then the Matisse which was a later and more advanced model from Spaceward.
There was no automation here, every frame had to be created just like traditional hand drawn animation but created via a tablet. The anti-smoking campaign was a cinema advertisement which I believe was only shown in Manchester cinemas.
The Super Crunchies advert was for television and was only shown in the Midlands area.
The Introduction of 3D
Graphics Showreel of Early 3D
3D modelling and animation started to make its way into the commercially available computers for the first time and clients wanted their logos tumbling and spinning into their corporate videos.
Here's a showreel of the graphics facilities at Optical Image, It's a good example of the different type of work that was produced at the studio including 3D and 2D animation.
Bear in mind a lot of the showreel would have been composited in the edit suite.
Below is a surviving example of the type of intro animation that I was producing.
It was from a pilot of a television show called Head, the idea being an unusual way of interviewing celebrities. This pilot featured Buster Bloodvessel from Bad Manners.
Visualising Holiday Resorts
From 1996 I began a 6 year period of building and animating holiday resorts. This usually included some dramatic opening sequence to show the resort being built, exterior shots of the finished resort and also interiors of the various apartments.
Architectural plans were usually supplied as the reference material to work from. All the interior decor and furniture were bespoke to that particular resort so all had to be built from scratch using reference from the interior designers.
Of course I also produced the general graphics that were needed for the promos including logos, graphs and anything else that was required. Below you can see some examples of the animation from this period.
Going Self Employed
In 2002 I decided to go freelance, I still worked on creating holiday resorts when required but work then became a lot more varied and I began to create animations for many different companies.
Since then I have produced a vast amount of animation, a small selection of this work can be seen in my main showreels here.
